Filed under: Productivity

One gem in Mac OS X that sometimes gets glanced over is the Services menu. Lots of readers may not know yet that Snow Leopard brought with it the ability to create your own customized service in Automator -- in other words, you can get additional selections on a contextual menu when right-clicking within a certain context, say a file within a Finder window. To create a customized service, all you have to do is launch Automator and select "Services" from the "Choose a template for your workflow" window, and then insert your own service from there.

Here are five customized services for you to install on your own Mac.

As we've previously pointed out, in many ways, Dashboard Widgets are the precursor to iPhone apps. Need to know when your latest packages will arrive? Yes, there's an app for that. But there's a widget too. Need to figure out how many pesos are in a dollar, or what a Quarter Pounder with Cheese comes out to in the metric system? There's an app, and a widget, for that as well. For this Friday afternoon, here are five useful Widgets to help you make the most of your Mac. And best of all, they're all free.

I've previously demonstrated how to use LaTeXiT to create and display complex math formulas and other symbols, and thank you readers for the additional recommendations!

While providing a means to display almost every imaginable existing symbol or character, a LaTeX-based solution may prove too complex and unnecessary for some. For the less "mathletic," Mac OS X's built-in character viewer is one of the easier ways to display characters of all sorts.

To enable the character viewer, open Mac OS X's System Preferences and select the "Language & Text" icon. Once there, click on the "Input Sources" tab and place a checkmark next to the "Keyboard & Character Viewer" box and "Show input menu in menu bar" box. The Keyboard & Character Viewer is now accessible on your menu bar.

Now, displaying special characters on your document, email, or whatever it is you're working on is just a drag and drop away.

Imagine if, as Steve Jobs moves through each slide of his Keynote presentation, he also has the telepathic powers to automatically tweet information related to the slide.

But even the almighty Steve Jobs can't do that.

Fortunately for him, there's Keynote Tweet. An open source AppleScript app, Keynote Tweet will automatically tweet the text from your presenter notes (accessible by clicking on "view" and selecting "show presenter notes").

Keynote Tweet was exposed to me while reading a piece by IDEO Labs' Gentry Underwood, who highlights the idea of large presentations increasingly occurring within the context of a backchannel in which audience members are responding to what's being presented.

Getting Keynote Tweet up and running is fairly straightforward. Simply download the app, and then add the following entry into the Keychain Access app:

• Keychain Item Name: http://twitter.com
• Account Name: Your email address
• Password: Your Twitter password

Now, with the Keynote Tweet app running, any text between the [twitter] and [/twitter] tags will automatically tweet when that slide is displayed (while in slideshow mode).

For example, "Jay Leno lacks the charm, wit and red headedness of Conan O' Brien" will be tweeted the moment I reach the slide showing the percentage of people that hate Jay Leno.

Keynote Tweet is available as a free download here.

[via IDEO Labs]

A new "hack" for Finder is in the works, and it's pretty darn cool. TotalFinder adds tabs, Visor-like functionality and a few other goodies (with more on the way) to your plain, vanilla Finder setup. If you're skittish, though, don't jump just yet. TotalFinder is alpha, and not in that way that developers label software just to be safe. It's really, really alpha. TotalFinder runs as a SIMBL plugin, too, which can (in some cases) cause some system instability in and of itself. However, if you've got the apples for it, it's a very cool new way to soup up your Finder.

In its current state, it does a few simple -- yet amazingly useful -- things, starting with adding tabs to Finder. Honestly, we got tabs in Terminal before Finder? This catches us up a little bit. The Visor feature (which is optional), assigns a hotkey that makes your tabbed Finder window slide onto the screen and disappear when you're not using it. It's take-or-leave for me at this point; it's cool, but it takes a lot of getting used to, especially for window-to-window file dragging within Finder. You can't currently drop files onto other tabs, so some problems arise in that situation. The other features include preventing .DS_Store file creation and sorting file listings with folders grouped on top.

For now, I'm sticking with Path Finder for my souped-up Finder needs, but TotalFinder has the potential to bring Finder into its own after years of relatively few improvements. You can grab a copy to try out (for free) at BinaryAge, and note that it comes with an uninstall script that will wipe it clean off your system if you don't like it.

[via Smoking Apples]

The iWork suite of apps (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) play nice with each other -- for the most part. Objects such as shapes, text boxes and tables created in one app can easily be copied and pasted onto another and retain their styles. Even an image with an instant alpha filter applied will retain its transparency when pasted onto another iWork app. However, the iWork apps don't always play nice with each other when it comes to charts.

In particular, copying a chart created in Numbers and pasting it onto either a Keynote presentation or Pages document doesn't always bring the chart's legend with it respective to how it looked in Numbers. Sometimes, the legend may be misaligned, and sometimes it may even show up on a completely different page in the document.

To address this annoyance, just highlight all of the elements (the entire chart and the legend, or anything else you want retained) of the chart that you'd like to copy. Then click on Numbers "Arrange" menu and select "Group" (or hit Command-Option-G). Now, the legend of your chart retains its alignment when pasted onto either a Keynote presentation or a Pages document. To alter or undo this, just select "Ungroup" (Command-Option-Shift-G) from the same file menu.

Billings, my personal favorite time-tracking, estimating and invoicing application has just updated to version 3.5. The developers, Marketcircle, are labeling it the "Trojan" release due to its mostly-under-the-hood improvements. Under the hood, but not insignificant. The major changes are related to a database engine overhaul (subtly continuing the car metaphor for your reading pleasure) and improvements to the way Billings interfaces with Address Book. Rest assured that "Trojan" refers only to the nature of the updates, not to any kind of malicious software).

I'm certain that those covert improvements, while exciting for current users, probably won't be enough to stir the passions of others. The fact that Billings 3.5 is now able to sync over WiFi with your iPhone might be cause for celebration... if only we had a version of Billings on those clever devices. Fear not, Billings Touch has been submitted to the App Store and is nearing availability as you read this. As a beta tester, I can't talk about the features of Billings Touch, but I think it's all right to tell you that it's everything I'd hoped it would be when AJ first mentioned it.

Billings is $39.99US, and Billings 3.5 (free upgrade for 3.0 users) will be required to sync with Billings Touch. Check out a free trial at billingsapp.com.

RSS reader support has been a built-in feature of Mail.app since version 3.0 (when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released). Although I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds, I've yet to find the need for a dedicated RSS reader app -- such as Newsgator's NetNewsWire.

I like having my email and news feeds in the same application. By default, RSS feeds that you subscribe to in Mail will appear in their own folder. If you'd like your RSS feeds to appear in your inbox, just click on the upward pointing arrow of an RSS feed(s) within the RSS section in Mail.app.

On the downside, this view of RSS feeds may flood your inbox and be overwhelming, depending on the number and the activity of feeds you're subscribed to. As a result, you may want to be selective in choosing your feeds. However, I've found this view particularly handy with time-sensitive feeds, and have used it on numerous occasions to score in-demand concert tickets (at face value prices, too!) with search-based Craigslist feeds.

Previously, I've mentioned that, despite their similar DNA and file interoperability, Microsoft Office for the PC and Mac are different in their own little subtle ways. This is part function: for example, Microsoft Excel on the Mac uses the 1904 date system, while its PC counterpart uses the 1900 system. But it's also part form. Upon first launch, Microsoft Word and Excel on the Mac present a more palette-oriented user interface, with a "toolbox palette," when compared to their pre-ribbon Windows counterparts. For some, this difference in UI schemas may serve as an annoyance.

Though I'll be using Word for this example, you can also make these changes in Excel using the same steps. To make Microsoft Office on your Mac look more Windows-like (pre-Office 2007, that is), first close the "toolbox palette." Next, click on "View," and then click on "toolbars," where you'll be presented with a host of toolbars to choose from. Despite a myriad of choices, choosing the "standard" (which is already selected by default) and "formatting" toolbars provides you with the most similar UI layout to that I've often seen in Microsoft Word on a Windows machine.

While it would be reasonable to assume that wanting to get rid of the toolbox palette would be more applicable to new PC-to-Mac converts, this isn't necessarily so. Regardless of one's sentiments toward Microsoft, most offices are, well, Microsoft Offices running on Windows. A consistent looking Word and Excel on our Macs could better facilitate one's workflow.

Since upgrading, Snow Leopard users with widescreen displays may have been missing WideMail, the plugin for Mail.app that gives you a 3-column display of your messages. We mentioned it some time ago, and you may recall it being one of the casualties of my Snow Leopard upgrade. Letterbox, an alternative plugin, has been mostly functional in Snow Leopard for a while now, but I've personally been waiting for WideMail. Well, it's back, and available as a public beta at developer Dane Harnett's site.

For users with widescreen displays, the standard Mail display panels -- stacked vertically -- don't really maximize the usage of the window space. WideMail takes advantage of the screen width of most modern displays, and positions the list of mails and the preview horizontally, allowing each to take up the full height of the window while still providing the necessary viewing area. It also provides a new column in the email listing called the "WideMail column," which has two rows and is configurable in the preferences to display any of the necessary information for each email in an optimized width.

As I mentioned, WideMail 2.0 is beta (prerelease 1 right now), but I've been using it for most of the day without any problems. I'm very glad to see it back, and despite trying to keep my Mail plugin list as trim as possible, this is one I consider worth running. If you try it and love it, be sure to donate a few bucks for its continued development!

Cinch is a new Mac utility from Irradiated Software. It helps keep your desktop windows organized by snapping them into predefined sizes and locations when you hold them near an edge of your screen. While its toolset is limited in comparison to its big sister, the keyboard-based SizeUp (which we covered a while back), Cinch is designed as a quick-and-easy window organization tool for users who prefer to stick with their mouse for such things.

When you run Cinch, it shows up in your menubar. When you drag any window to a top, left or right edge of the screen, it "snaps" (or cinches) to take up the full width or height of the screen: top half stretched horizontally if dragged to the top, and a vertical half for left or right. It's handy, and it's easy to get so used to it that you forget it isn't built into the operating system.

Cinch works with multi-monitor setups, and there's no configuration necessary. Just run it and start dragging windows where you need them. Cinch is available for download as a free trial, and a license can be had for $7US.

One of the neat things about Mail.app is rules. Rules will perform a specified action if a certain condition is met. These actions include moving, copying, and setting the color of a message, as well as automatically replying, forwarding, and redirecting a message. For example, the "News from Apple" rule, which highlights messages received from Apple in light blue, is included in mail.app by default. Here are a few of my favorite rules.